


Linguistic Empathy

by bloodofthepen



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 10:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16217372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodofthepen/pseuds/bloodofthepen
Summary: The Master stumbles upon something he’d rather not deal with. Humorous situation taken seriously.





	Linguistic Empathy

**Author's Note:**

> I might end up continuing this piece (if there's interest or I decide I really want to explore more), but it’s complete for now.

Where the wind blew, the sound was carried apace. It swept through a hamlet, a squat, ugly old town on a byway worthy of no one’s notice. The town was nothing, it was nowhere. And for the Master’s purposes, it was perfect.

On the outskirts of the hamlet, he strode with singular purpose.

This was a byway, a transitory place, and therefore crossed with, marked out, by lay-lines and humming veils of transient energy. Each path as it unfolded before him was copied down with careful precision in the plane of his memory, photographic, an invisible map only he might access. And across the grasses and beaten ground, the wind blew. It stirred velvet coattails with a flutter. It rippled green wheatfields like ocean waves.

But above all, where the wind blew, the sound did, too.

The sound had been there since the beginning of the day’s venture and remained halfway through the task of mapping. It was filtered out of the Master’s hearing, unimportant as the little hamlet itself--but the disturbance remained in the back of his mind, humming, hovering, waiting to be acknowledged.

At the crest of a hill that overlooked the fields, the squat houses, the beaten road, and the raggedy trees the locals called a forest, the sound was louder. It changed in pitch.

This called for reevaluation.

The Master frowned; he did not care to leave tasks half-done. But something--

It was a voice.

The sound that rode the wind was something speaking--speaking a tongue not of those in the village, nor the countryside surrounding, not of human travellers. It rose and fell in pitch, it cried--first loud, and then soft enough that even his ear strained to catch a syllable.

The language was old, and the Master could not place it. Familiar, tugging at his mind, something he had not bothered to translate in centuries.

It was a cry for help, full of fear. Drenched with emotion in way few languages across the galaxy can manage, nearly telepathic in nature, an empathic language to anyone with the tools to listen.

The fact that he could not place it was both interesting and infuriating. He could never resist a puzzle, so, the task went half-done for the moment as he picked his way through the grasses and wheat, listening. He crept through brush, ducked into the scant shade of half-living trees, slunk over the ivy that crept across a bed of leaves and stones. And--

The realization struck full-force, an insubstantial wind that rushed in his ears.

A baby. It was a _baby_.

Well. Well, there’s _that_ done, and no need to get involved.

Except he can see it. And it’s stopped crying.

Because it can see _him_.

The child is human, of course, and it cannot be more than a few… well, it’s certainly not able to walk. Nor crawl, from the look of it. It’s a chubby-cheeked thing, wrapped tightly in a woolen blanket--though it’s managed to get one arm loose, poking up near its face, wide eyes blinking at him, fingers wiggling as they clench and unclench the blanket’s edge. It makes an inquiring sort of “ahhhhhhhh.”  

The Doctor, he recalls, always made grand embellishments in translation of infant-speech. In reality, their “language” is hardly made up of words or even word-like impressions until the parts of the brain that receive and process language are completely up and running--somewhere in a Gallifreyan’s second year--and even then, a child’s language is ideas and sounds that imitate a parent’s speech. Concepts are there, certainly, but the poetry was always purely for effect on the Doctor’s part.

The Master indulges in no such nonsense.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he tells it in English. “Your parents clearly have no use for you, and I certainly don’t either.”

The child stops blinking, stares with dark, milky blue eyes, incredibly round, almost symmetrical. It stares quite hard, with rapt attention--for an infant.

The Master stares right back. And immediately--well, _regret_ is not the word he would choose, but he nonetheless immediately regrets it as the thoughts come pouring through.

If there is one thing all children know how to do by instinct, telepathic or not, it’s _project_.

The thoughts of an infant are not complex; in fact, they barely register a concrete sense of self, let alone the outside world, but they _feel_. They feel so much, so strongly. They haven’t forgotten how, not yet.

The Master’s mind is filled with brilliance, golden yellow like this planet’s sun, and blue and green and so, so full of _light_. But he is a Time Lord, borrowed body or no, and he is more than strong enough to block out the discomforting, alien projections.

He does not.

This is what it feels like to be _new_. It’s brilliant, wonderful, awesome in the sense of chaos and terror and beauty. And somehow, so easy, easy to forget once you’ve made sense of it all, organized it neatly and given it names and laws and quantities.

He breaks contact before he gets lost in the thrill.

The child makes a burbling sound.

“No, absolutely not.”

It wiggles tiny, thin fingers inquisitively.

“Things you cannot possibly conceive, that’s what!”

The infant smiles, exposing gums and crinkling its eyes.

No. _No_ , _no_ , _no_ , _no_ , _no_.

The Master straightens his back, glowers down at the little bundle. “It’s a cruel universe, I’m afraid, and you’re staying here.”

The burbling again.

“I am most certainly not posturing! I’ve no need to _posture_ to an _infant primitive!_ ”

The child stares. It crinkles its button nose, and that touches a memory.

“Even _if_ I took you back to the village, it’s likely you’ll be put out again, if not drowned in barrel. You’re probably diseased.”

The child wiggles against the blanket, reaches out a hand toward him--likely by accident, of course, experimentation more than intention.

The Master frowns and kneels in the dirt and the leaves. He tucks a gloved finger into the the tiny hand, and it grabs hold in a firm, little grasp.

“Reflexes,” he sighs. “At least _those_ are functional.”

The child is still struggling in its woolen prison, and starts to whine.

“Stop that,” the Master snaps in Gallifreyan, and the child immediately obeys, though there was not an ounce of hypnotic intent in the syllables; the child is probably shocked by comprehension more than anything. It is more than capable of reading intention in a half-empathic language; perhaps in the right environment, even a human adolescent or adult could retain the ability. “I know you’re hungry. I heard you before. You were mostly afraid, then. Alone. But not now? _Now_ you’re hungry? You don’t even know if you’re safe. I could simply put you out of your misery. Save you the pain of the scavenging creatures.”

But the child does not cry.

It has no concept of death, no capacity for mistrust.  

He untucks the woolen blanket and carefully inspects the child, removing one glove to pass his hand over new skin to check the bones and muscle and sinew underneath, casting a little telepathic empathy to feel for any pain or abnormalities in sensation.

“Aha.” On the arm still tucked against the child’s body was a nub with five little, round beginnings of fingers, and no more. To be perfectly frank, he suspected the child would simply shed the useless flesh as it grew and have one perfectly well-formed arm simply missing a hand. “Is that all? No infection, no malfunction of the brain or body?”

Primitives. Only an animal leaves its young to die over something so _simple_. The child still functions; in fact, it’s perfectly healthy. “Have they no prosthetics?” Not that the child would likely even _need_ one. A child growing without knowledge of what they lack learns to function, to excel, with the hand it’s dealt.

No pun intended, of course. Bad habit, that. He blames the Doctor.

The Master takes the edges of the blanket and tucks it back around the child with gentle hands--so as not to damage the thing. Humans are fragile; their young especially. He lifts the infant and tucks it against his chest, nestles it between velvet and wool with a muscle memory he attributes to this borrowed body. The body of a father.

His urge to cast the thing back down is routed by memories. The memory of a loomling.

The human infant makes another whine that translates to hunger.

“You know, there is a perfectly suitable food-source somewhere nearby--ideal, as it was created especially for you.” Absently, the Master runs bare fingers over the child’s head, ruffling the few, downy strands of hair there. “Let’s give your genetic matron a fright, hm?” He sets off with long strides toward the village, plans filed away in the back of his mind. He has a time machine, after all; the plot can wait a while. “And then, back to my TARDIS for some clothes, I shouldn’t wonder. Is this acceptable?”

He glances down at the bundle for affirmation, but the child, little eyes closed, snuggled into his coat, is already asleep.


End file.
